RE: The Atlantic’s Lost Boys and the Future of the AltRight

November 14, 2017

The Atlantic has a whole issue dedicated to the AltRight, including an essay, The Lost Boys, which attempts to understand the political movement in neoliberal language and framing. A big theme for everybody outside the movement is the fracture which emerged shortly after Trump’s election between the “AltLite” and the “AltRight.” I don’t give much thought to the loss of Gavin McInnes, Milo, and Steve Bannon, but it’s important from the mainstream perspective because that division confirms that we won’t be able to pull off another mainstream electoral coup like we did in 2016 in the near term.

The rift was unavoidable, and only the intense pressure of the unique election cycle held it together as long as it lasted. It’s perhaps a shame, as is the current stress between the AltRight and Hard Right after Charlottesville. Ultimately, though, these growing pains are natural and necessary. Until we as a movement truly understand what the mega-trends are, and how to get out in front of them, there will be a wide range of panicked and abortive calls for us to all do this or that in order to prolong what’s popularly understood as a social fad that can dissipate as quickly as it emerged.

Our critics seem to understand our movement better than our leadership, confirming that young white males are responding to major trends in Western society which show no sign of abatement. The labels and leaders may well shuffle around, but the White kids aren’t going to get any less angry.

To the unhappy forum dwellers who identified themselves as “beta males” and neets (“not in education, employment, or training”), what the alt-right offered was a revalorized masculinity, a sense of purpose, and a collective identity. Identity has become the coin of the realm in American culture, but one that’s not accessible to the heirs of white male hegemony. While everyone else was telling these young men to check their privilege, the alt-right was speaking powerfully to their Millennial woes—their diminished place in society, their dwindling economic prospects, their growing alienation.

It’s not about optics, style, branding, symbolism, or marketing. It’s about a large cohort of Western Civilization, arguably the most sizable and dangerous: White males–lashing out against the oblivion which is planned for them by our globalist elites.

Amid this desert of meaning into which Millennials were born, the new far right expertly pinpointed the existential questions, particularly for those who couldn’t be permitted a collective identity, namely straight white men: Who are we? What is our story? What is our future?

In essence, despite the obligatory insults and negativity, she’s trying to communicate to the arbiters of serious opinion that we have a valid argument without being cast into the same bucket of deplorables. This is not an enviable task, and nobody will listen.

[T]he forces behind the movement, not least the rapid demographic transformation of the Western world, are not going away. Those who do not want to see the far right reassert itself—not this year or next year, or in five or 10 or 20 years—must provide a different vision of the future, one that is based on a joint sense of purpose and that delivers on the promise of material progress.

She offers Bernie as a potential solution, even though Bernie was also powerless against the anti-White forces which have come to dominate mainstream discourse. Entire generations of immigrants and minorities have been promised a future where the native Whites–especially White males–are humiliated, institutionally discriminated against, and consigned to a future of decline, dispossession, and displacement. Our Replacements have been too emboldened to be reasoned with by soothsayers of the post-White utopia like Barack Obama. Angela sees the train wreck that is destined to happen but is powerless to stop it. Even Bernie was left with no choice but to stand there and take it when Black Lives Matter stole his microphone. He then conceded to their demands to make his campaign explicitly anti-white.

That moment, when Bernie lost his microphone to the fat black bitches, will go down in history as the point of no return for the neoliberal order. It was the moment when race triumphed over conventional politics and universalist narratives. Aggressive identity politics for all but one group isn’t sustainable, and young Whites are smart enough to see that the universalist bullshit is only being pitched at and for them. Only a terrifying show of force by the dispossessed White males could possibly bring the immigrants and minorities to reconsider their course. And by the time Whites are angry and organized enough to assert themselves, they will probably be in no mood to arrive at the kind of compromise Angela envisions, one where White males have a respected and secure role within the multicultural West.

Three mega-trends guarantee our victory, the first being the demographic forces sweeping the West and pushing race to the foreground. The second is the alienation, dysfunction, and degeneracy of our increasingly derelict “mass society.” The third, least understood, is the democratization and decentralization of communication technology which is empowering the youngest Westerners to arrive at post-modern, post-colonial responses to this mass society. Contrary to popular assumptions in academia, the post-modern response will be centered on White males, with immigrants, minorities, Jews, and feminists desperately clinging to the 20th century’s obsolete universalist patterns of thinking and behaving.

Advances in communication and transportation in the Twentieth Century have shattered the family and community bonds, leaving a neurotic seething mass of alienated consumers who don’t live near their family members, don’t know their neighbors, and have absolutely no meaningful stake or say in their communities. The lack of social accountability and stake manifests in the acting out, the flamboyant sexual dysfunction, the transgender fad, and other consequences of people trying to achieve attention and belonging where only increasingly startling behavior achieves any attention whatsoever. The only communities to belong to are therapeutic ones for the deviant and dysfunctional.

But the most recent advances in communication are resolving the problems introduced by the first generations of electronic communication. Social media is allowing for and inculcating post-geographical, neo-tribal social spaces with their own norms, mores, standards, and rules which operate independently of mass society. This is being decried as a dangerous rise in “echo chambers” by the old media, but how else would they interpret an existential challenge to their centrality and relevance? In time, the “social media” of the recent past where there’s a singular “community standard” is evolving into a sort of “tribal media” where hermetically sealed groups develop their own language, status signals, and particular “community standards” of their own.

A new moral seriousness is emerging, thanks to social media bringing back the social visibility and accountability which was the primary driver behind people traditionally behaving sensibly. Transitioning from the Millennials to Generation Zyklon, the troll, who existed relative to and in perennial defiance of mass culture gives way to the radical, who doesn’t care enough about mass society to bother reacting to it. He exists relative to his radical peers in their echo chamber, not in defiance of mass society like the troll and not fruitlessly seeking a superficial identity signals like the Gen X’s hipster. His identity is authentic, referencing first principles, ethnic consanguinity, and behavioral norms shared by his neo-tribal collective.

These generational things take time to manifest, and we can expect Millennials to continue thinking and behaving relative to mass culture, trading in plausible deniability, bantz, and tactical framing long after Generation Zyklon has grown bored with the bantz. Gen X hipsters will continue fixating on superficial social and cultural optics and the Boomer will continue seeking universal and utopian solutions within the mass society context. These trends will be gradual, inconsistent, and halting, but nationalists can get ahead of the curve by ensuring that we approach Generation Zyklon with an honesty, clarity, and indifference to “the masses” which necessarily defines prior generations. There will be numerous insular subcultures spanning the political, social, cultural, and racial spectrum. The only thing they’ll share in common is an abandonment of the social and political commons.

The rise of the AltRight is actually the first rip in the neoliberal fabric. While White Nationalism is destined to re-emerge in Europe’s colonial diaspora, and that’s an alarming concern for the apostles of mass culture, mass culture is more broadly doomed. Vicious cycles of abandonment of the social commons will sweep up blended and non-white communities as well. Angela claims that the young men of the AltRight could define American politics for a generation, but even her rather ambitious framing of our movement falls short of the full scope of what’s afoot. America’s coming unglued, technology accelerating it, and there’s no possible way to halt these trends. The battles of Sacramento and Charlottesville will come to be remembered not as a false start, but as the first tremors in a radical and sweeping reconfiguration of the entire Western order.